Student Porn Project in Turkey Misfires

by Lorna D.

Professors lose their jobs, government investigates.

Turkey: clearly not yet ready for porn on a massive scale. Case in point—in the states, it’s totally cool if our graduate students make amateur-style nudie movies for their masters theses (right?), but in Turkey, it gets a slew of folks in major trouble and fired from their jobs.

Three professors at Istanbul's Bilgi University have been sacked in the aftermath of what was called, simply enough, “The Porn Project.” The movie was intended to show that there “are also professional productions which simulate the look of an amateur, individual and/or homemade movies,” and according to the grad student in question, Deniz Ozgun, that has some sort of highbrow academic value. Something about the aesthetics of seediness, maybe? Ozgun failed the class, by the way.

The movie then fell into obscurity, and might never have come up again if the Turkish magazine Tempo hadn’t covered the porn project in an exposé. After that, the media flurry resulted in two professors and the founder of the university’s visual design department being immediately fired for approving the project.

Now there’s talk about possibly prosecuting the involved parties under Turkish obscenity laws. Wow. Makes one appreciate the freedom of porn we are privy to in the states, doesn’t it?